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scottyguitar's Activity

I believe the Dart body started as a Revell annual kit. The Revellion was a mashup of the annual kit body and the aforementioned Tony Nancy dragster chassis. I will have to dig out the reference but this may have been one of Jim Keeler's projects at Revell.

I had this kit when it first came out. Those Revell dragster kits were challenging for a ten year old me, for sure.

I have been using "scottyguitar" as a user name for almost 20 years, since I first discovered the WWW. The simple answer is that my name is Scott and I play guitar. But the truth is a little more complicated. I have been a Frank Zappa fan since the early 70s. Zappa was a big fan of Johnny "Guitar" Watson and used his talents on several albums in the 70s and 80s. I liked the name and adapted it
for myself when I joined several bulletin boards back in the day.

I came within about a hair's breadth of buying one of those in 1985. I was stationed in Germany and the PX auto sales joint had one on display. It was a neat little hot rod back in the day- tuned suspension, heel/toe pedals and turbocharged. The old lady gave me "the look" (you married guys know what that means) and we wound up buying a VW GTI instead. She thought the Shelby was too sporty, lol. In retrospect, I think I got the better car.

I have one of those kits packed away. It has a lot of parts for a snapper.

If you watch any of the muscle car auctions on TV, pretty much all you see are optioned-out big block cars. Even cars that started out with small block V8s or even sixes are being "restored" as big-block "tribute" cars. So the model companies see what sells in the big car world and that's what they make to sell to folks like us. It's a kind of revisionist history at the very least. If I didn't know better I would think that everything made between 1964 and 1973 had big-inch motors after watching these auctions and seeing what the model companies sell today.

I remember when I was living in Tucson, Arizona in 1974. The oil embargo that started the year before caused many people to unload their gas guzzlers for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. I saw MANY muscle cars on used car lots for stupid cheap money. At the time I didn't have two nickels to rub together! Now they are selling for big coin.

I have owned one car that could be considered muscular- a 1970 AMC Javelin SST. It did not have a 390- it was a 360/auto car. I bought it with my bonus money I received after joining the Army in 1974. The price? $1200.

On the subject of Lindberg- yeah, a lot of their old stuff was pretty toylike. But most of the kits they did in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty decent, overall.

To add to what Art wrote, I have had no problems filing or sanding super glue on plastic or resin, as long as the work is done within 24 hours of using the stuff. After that it can be rock hard and difficult to work with.

It is not impossible to remove glue marks from clear plastic (provided the spot isn't too deeply damaged) but it does require a lot of elbow grease. I like to use a medium sanding stick to smooth the area, followed by a special triple grit stick I got at a beauty supply store. I don't know specifically what grit it is but it has a fine section on one side and the other side is split between a really fine grit and a smooth burnisher. When I finish with the burnisher it is almost shiny. Lastly, I polish the whole piece with Novus plastic polish. A final finish of Future would probably look good but I have never had to use it- the clear parts usually look passable to my eyes after polishing.

You have to be careful not to sand a flat spot on curved pieces.

If the piece is too badly damaged or you just want a new piece you can use the original as a buck and heat form clear acetate over it to make a new piece. That's sort of an old-school solution but one I have used in the past.

That Ford truck with the long arm in front is indeed a tree shaker, used in pecan orchards to knock the pecans out of the trees for harvesting. The arm is long because there is a canvas skirt that is placed under the tree to catch the falling pecans; the arm length allows stand-off distance for the truck to prevent crushing the pecans. It looks like the truck is parked in a pecan orchard. If you look close you can see pecans lying on the front of the contraption.